Render Unto CaesarThe Amazement of the Pharisees

“When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.”

This is the end of a passage most people know only as “render unto Caesar”. So why were the Pharisees amazed? Because they’d asked Jesus whether to pay taxes and he’d said yes? Not exactly. They’d just gotten owned. Let’s walk through Matthew 22:15-22…

“Then the Pharisees went out and laid plans to trap him in his words.” [15]

This is what’s known as “context”. It’s the beginning of the story. And a clever plan it was, as we’ll soon see.

“They sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians.” [16]

Why the Herodians? The plan involved asking Jesus a question to which there could not possibly be a right answer. The answer they hoped he’d give would result in his immediate arrest and the end of his mission. Game over, Pharisees win. They came prepared.

“‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘we know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are. Tell us then, what is your opinion? Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not?”‘ [16-17]

Nasty. We know you’re an honest guy and always speak the truth, so maybe you can resolve this apparent contradiction for us: if the person of a man is immaterial, how is Caesar due tribute just for being Caesar? Is taxation legitimate? What a trap. If he says yes, pay your taxes, he contradicts and discredits himself in front of witnesses, and his mission is over. If he says no, don’t pay your taxes, he’s arrested and the end result is the same. Worse, answering the question at all would constitute a claim to rabbinical authority he could not, on paper so to speak, back up, and of course refusing to answer would be the worst move of all. He was basically doomed.

He opens by making it clear to everyone present that he knows what they’re up to. This is about to become important.

“‘Show me the coin used for paying the tax.’ They brought him a denarius…” [19]

This bears close examination. As we know from this context, plus the inscription we’re bout to hear about, plus a little history, it was struck at Caesar’s private mint specifically for the purpose of paying soldiers, and it was the only coin that could be used to pay taxes. Very few people ran around with these things in their pockets, because they were hard to come by and you’d better have them come tax time. Only people with easy access to them, which were people very close to the state, carried them around and used them in commerce. They said in no uncertain terms, “do you know who I am?” Bystanders, as if they didn’t already know, bore witness in these few seconds to the corruption of the Pharisees.

So he asked whose it was, but in the eyes of those present – in the temple district – the damage was done. It was, the Pharisees confirmed, an idolatrous coin with a graven image of a man claiming to be a god. Just as bad, the reverse of the coin identified Caesar as the high priest of the goddess Pax. Not friendly to the Pharisees. Jesus seizes the tactical advantage, but he does much more.

He has also, in the space of a few seconds, solved the problem of answering a halakhic question without a claim to the authority to do so. In the well established tradition of formal rhetoric in first-century rabbinical literature, when an outsider poses a hostile question (as Jesus identified it in his opening) to a well-educated rabbi, he will respond with a question of his own, the answer to which he knows and which will render his opponent’s malevolent question vulnerable to attack when answered.

Further, his counter-question invoked the terms “image” and “inscription” and thereby three central provisions in the Torah: the first and second commandments and the Shema. The commandments prohibit the worship of anything but God and the crafting of any false image for adoration, both of which are violated by the presented coin carried and presented by the Pharisees.

The Shema is an important Jewish prayer in the same spirit (exclusive worship of God) which also requires observant Jews to literally or figuratively (on their hearts, for example) “inscribe” it in conspicuous places.

That is, he responded as a well-trained rabbi would have, and successfully so.

“Then he said to them, ‘So give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.'” [21]

This is just dripping with insinuation. “How about you give these idolatrous coins back to your benefactor in Rome who made them instead of carrying around to intimidate people, and give God his due.” What, by the way, is God’s, and what is left after that to be Caesar’s?

This is the killing blow. He has not only escaped the trap, he’s sent his interrogators scurrying away defeated. He’s solidified his authority in the eyes of all witnesses. He’s presented an argument against taxation, without leaving himself vulnerable to arrest. He’s discredited the Pharisees, or rather tricked them into doing it for him. We now understand why:

“When they heard this, they were amazed. So they left him and went away.” [22]

5 comments

This is perceptive, Rocco — the focus upon “the trap”, and the amazement of the Pharisees at having their subterfuge so readily exposed. However, I see much the same phenomenon today among “friends” — often fellow libertarians. I think it’s done without malice and often subconsciously, but sometimes wonder.

The ugly possessive pronoun “your” is the culprit. I’ll link to a similar interchange here to illustrate (you’ll probably need to scroll up and down to get the gist):

Debate gambits (“traps”) from time immemorial. I suspect not a few of my libertarian friends rue the day I stumbled upon writings of the late (and inconsequential from a “prominent libertarian” standpoint) Delmar England. He wrote an essay and a book (published posthumously):

Seeing no “edit” button, I’ll make a correction here: the first link in my recent comment will take you only to the google search page (which would bring you to the intended essay by clicking the top choice); but here’s the link:

Rocco, Your exegesis is spot on. The Gospel of Luke makes it even cleared that Jesus’ pithy response should be interpreted to mean, “pay Caesar nothing,” for none of the listeners nor anyone in the Roman Empire was ever in possession of anything belonging to Caesar to “give back” to him. Caesar was a taker, not a giver nor lender. Everything he might claim was his had been stolen from others by violent conquest, plunder, enslavement, fraud, extortion and taxation–but I repeat myself–all in violation of God’s Commandment, “Thou shall not steal.” And so in addition to the insinuations you mentioned, Jesus also insinuated the fact that Caesar was a thief.

Luke 20 makes an important point left out–but only be ellipsis–in the accounts of the same incident in the Gospels o f Matthew 22, and Mark 12. Luke describes the design of the trap, how it would work and the purpose of the entrapping question, to wit: “To trap him in his words, so as to hand him over to the power and authority of the governor.” Pilate was the governor, and he was responsible for the collection of Rome’s taxes throughout Judea. So, obviously Jesus enemies never even considered he would say, “Pay the tax.” From frequent encounters and the reports of their agents, they knew Jesus would never endorse Caesar’s tax, nor deny the fact that the principles he had been preaching made Caesar’s authority to collect taxes nugatory. And they knew Jesus wouldn’t renounced his known opposition to taxes for the very reasons they gave in their flattery of him: “‘[W]e know that you are a man of integrity and that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are.”

Luke’s account makes an important point: The question wasn’t meant to get him in trouble whether he answered yes or no. They knew he wouldn’t answer yes, and regardless of the presence of the Herodians, a yes answer couldn’t possibly hurt him.

This is crucial because Christian exegetes for 1700 years have been telling people Jesus ducked answering the question directly because if he said, “Yes, pay Caesar’s tax,” which is what Christians have been told was what he would have said if it wasn’t a trap, he would have lost favor among the people who were his followers–as if Jesus gave a whit about what anyone might think of him for stating the Truth.

The question was meant to induce him to say, “Don’t pay Caesar’s tax.” He as much as said, ‘Don’t pay Caesar’s tax,” but he said it in such a way that if his enemies tried to use his words against him before the governor, Pilate would erroneously think Jesus’ words were an endorsement of Caesar’s tax, when in fact they were a brilliant condemnation thereof. Anyone who is dishonest enough to believe taxation is a lawful way of obtaining another person’s property is liable to misinterpret Jesus’ response, as many Christians have been doing at least since the Church was subsumed by the Roman Empire during the reign of Constantine, and the hierarchy began sharing in the lucre of Roman taxes. Saying Jesus endorsed paying those taxes was a stroke of satanic genius, but not unexpected from those whose authority to rule is derived from the devil himself. (See Luke 4)

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